Horrible performance bringing in the 5th toon

Generally I've been 5 boxing with 2 machines. A decent 4 core and an older AMD. I put the main on the AMD and had the 4 core setup with 1 core per toon. My older machine has been slowly dying and I decided I would try to toss the 5th toon onto my 4 core. Wow... framerates drop to a crawl. Porting into Dal is a 4 minute lagfest. Can't even move.

I've tried a couple of configurations - having the "Main" share with 1/2/4 cores (to see how the load was distributed). Oddly, dropping any 1 toon seems to make my performance acceptable so I must be hitting some invisible threshold (even when I'm dropping a toon from a smaller window it makes a huge difference). Am I doing this wrong? I really am not in the mood to buy more hardware - would I get better results from removing the SLI on my video cards (so the processing is seperated by video card? What about setting the "alts" to share 3 cores and leaving one core for just the main? Any other ideas?

Thanks

How much RAM do you have on your machine ? You might be getting out of the 1GB per client soft spot.

Sorry, Vista Ultimate 64bit - 8Gb of Ram
Proc: Q6600 2.4 Ghz

Try this. Have windows manage your wow clients on all 4 cores. Set the affinity to 15 for each client and then all 4 cores are engaged for all 5 clients. I did this and saw a large performance increase. In addition, on my machine and settings 5 wow clients take up ~6 GB of ram. A 64 bit OS helps too. I don't know what your display hardware is like but if you have 2 monitors and 2 cards you can look into InnerSpace for multiple GPU management which will also help with performance.

But first, check your ram usage under task manager. I think that may be the culprit. If you have enough then try running all clients on all 4 cores.

Drommon

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ghallo

Sorry, Vista Ultimate 64bit - 8Gb of Ram
Proc: Q6600 2.4 Ghz

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That should handle 5 with no problems. I really ecourage you to set all clients on all cores, you will see a boost. Also your read times from your drives might be poor.

Drommon

Hardware RAID for performance, but I will try all 4 cores and see if that makes a difference. Thanks!

Before my upgrade, I was running 5 clients on:

Windows Vista 64-bit, Home Premium, Service Pack 3.
Q6600 at 2.4ghz (stock)
8gb ddr @ 800mhz
ATI Sapphire 4870 X2
150gb Raptor (10,000rpm)
All 4 cores on every wow.
One wow folder.


Dalaran was a bit choppy, and epic ground mounts would lose follow consistently, but on foot follow always worked fine. Hearthing there did not take longer then anywhere else. Numlock on, with epic flyers would lose follow too, but stop and go worked fine.

Similar machine and I am getting follow drops in AV with Crusader Aura. Not sure if the following distance places them outside the aura range. It also gets laggy in big standoffs, 60+ players AoEing etc. I've been steadily turning settings down to see if I can make a performance impact.

I have all 4 clones running on core 3 and 4 with everything else on core 1 and 2. I'll try switching all of them to all cores and see if it makes any difference.

I tried WG once, only 4 got into it, it was pretty bad performance wise. Not sure if it was because one of my characters was stuck in AV while the rest was in WG or whether it would have struggled with all 5 in WG as well. My gut feel is the latter.

I am having the same problem. Same system configuration as the OP. Let's pretend I have NO technical knowledge... how do I "share" my Wow programs across all cores ? I have no idea where to even check and see if this is happening. I know when I open all 5 accts, my FPS drops down to like 4.3 thanks in advance

Maybe not related, but I had an issue with cores and affinity. Windows consider each core as two cores because of hyperthreading on my machine, so basically, my first set-up was using half the physical cores.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Nighthawk38

I am having the same problem. Same system configuration as the OP. Let's pretend I have NO technical knowledge... how do I "share" my Wow programs across all cores ? I have no idea where to even check and see if this is happening. I know when I open all 5 accts, my FPS drops down to like 4.3 thanks in advance

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In the WTF folder open up config using wordpad. Find SET coresDetected "4" . Underneath that should be a SET processAffinityMask "0" .

Do this ->

SET processAffinityMask "15"

Setting it at 15 makes 1 WoW client use all 4 cores. Do this for each wow folder. You should have a wow folder for each client that is symlinked to a master folder. Once done you will see all 5 clients running on 4 cores. When I did this my cpu resources (Q9550) never goes above 40%. Where as any other combo caused 100% spikes thus causing some characters to fall behind.

Drommon

Maybe your video card just isn't up to par? I didn't see you specify your video card. I run 5 on a quad 8400 with 8 gigs of ram and my only lag is caused by an older video card.

For those of you who have 8 cores (4 physical + 4 hyper) here is a cool chart to use http://wikizap.mobi/enwow/CVar_processAffinityMask

It also reflects 4 cores. And with affinity set at 15 forces the OS to use 4 cores per client. Even if you are soloing, setting the affinity to 15 will allow you to see some boost in fps.

Drommon

I7 users should set core affinity to 255 as they have 8 cores (4 physical 4 virtual) though that link recommends 85 probably to devote some resources to background processes

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Whowantstoknow

I7 users should set core affinity to 255 as they have 8 cores (4 physical 4 virtual) though that link recommends 85 probably to devote some resources to background processes

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Actually 85 is the physical cores. 255 is 85 plus the hyperthreaded cores. There is evidence (somewhere) that 255 runs a little slower than 85 for wow clients.

Drommon

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Svpernova09

Maybe your video card just isn't up to par? I didn't see you specify your video card. I run 5 on a quad 8400 with 8 gigs of ram and my only lag is caused by an older video card.

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I run 2 8800 GTs. Not in SLI - I've debated that, but I isolate each monitor to one of the cards.

My video card is an Nvidia 9500 GS. I've been told it is plenty to handle multiple instamces of WoW

I was thinking... since it, as far as I understand, mostly revolve around the fifth toon, could it be that the setup for this toon is different than the other 3 "adds"?

What im thinking, my setup has the main at full throttle and the rest capped at 20 fps. Maybe this have glitched on the fifth toon so you go full throttle on this one aswell. This might slow your system.

I use a Geforce 9800 GT 1GB ram, and I run 5x wow very smoothly - with the occational hickup in major cities, but I think this is because of loadtime from the harddrive's

Well, I moved to SLI last night, changed my Power Management to Performance (and in the registry per the other post). Those 2 changes actually seem to have made a differance. I am now getting 2-4 frames/sec in Dal instead of 1.2.

Yeah. You read that right.

The major change was outside of the city. Follow no longer breaks and I was able to do HoL without too much trouble (other than the fact that I stink at MBoxing and wiped on the 3rd boss).

I understand what Seldum is saying about adding the 5th - the odd thing is it does not matter which of the clients I close. If I close ANY I am fine.

Heck, even having 1 client not in Dalaran, and 4 in Dalaran, my performance is 20-30fps.

Getting on a bird is the same issue as Dal. Horrible frames (but I don't care - I don't need the scenery in that situation).

Have you monitored your RAM usage lately?

Tonight I experienced lag (5-15 fps on main) in Shattrad city. I looked at my ram usage and each wow client sucked up just under 1 gb. I have a total of 6gb on my system, so I think I have found a bottleneck there....

I wonder if I should buy another 6gb and if it would help.

@Seldum drop yer resolution it should reduce the amount of memory each one uses.


@Ghallo have yeh tried dropping all the affects push that slider all the way to the left?
Just to see if it helps.

Do you have 5 copies of wow? primary reason to get low fps in dalaran is because it has lots of textures to load which points to the harddrive being the bottleneck.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Seldum

Have you monitored your RAM usage lately?

Tonight I experienced lag (5-15 fps on main) in Shattrad city. I looked at my ram usage and each wow client sucked up just under 1 gb. I have a total of 6gb on my system, so I think I have found a bottleneck there....

I wonder if I should buy another 6gb and if it would help.

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I have 8GB and my 5 wow clients and the OS uses ~6gb. So yes getting more ram is generally helpful. I would prioritize the order of upgrades to be ->

Ram
HDD -> SSD
CPU
GPU

My 4850's are only using about 60% of capacity. This could mean I have a bottleneck somewhere before the data gets to the GPU. It may also mean that I set all the catalyst drivers to performance over quality.

Drommon

im also running a q6600 clocked to 3.2ghz with 4gb of ram standard sata hard drive (no raid) and a gtx280 graphics and i run 5 on 2 monitors no problems. get around 40-60 on main screen (1toon) and the 4 on the 2nd screen are clipped at 15-20.

and resolution is on main screen 1wow 1440x900 and the other is 4wows at 770-450 each

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wowphreak

@Seldum drop yer resolution it should reduce the amount of memory each one uses.


@Ghallo have yeh tried dropping all the affects push that slider all the way to the left?
Just to see if it helps.

Do you have 5 copies of wow? primary reason to get low fps in dalaran is because it has lots of textures to load which points to the harddrive being the bottleneck.

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Thought I would share my tweaks.

I lowered shadow settings (way low), ground clutter/density and (medium) and this helped with the ram usage. It lowered it from 885 mb per client to 675 mb per client.
I also tweaked the performance of the GPU power to high performance like describes in another topic, and set the alts to 20 fps in ISBoxer from 30 fps.

Now I have 20-40 fps in Shattrad City.

I also bough 6GB additional Ram, so they should help once I get them installed. Can't wait to see if theres an improvement.

I feel like its a RAM issue, not really a graphic issue. That and loadtime from my Raid setup.

Just wanted to give you an update. Installed the new 6 GB ram and I have now a total of 12 gb.

It helped alot, but i guess it also helped that I turned off the shadows... Who needs that anyway :D